OLD AGE QUOTES IV
quotations about old age
Before forty we live forwards; after forty we live backwards.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
Age is never so old as youth would measure it.
JACK LONDON
"The Wit of Porportuk"
Women are beautiful when they're young, and not after. Men can still preserve their sex appeal well into old age.... Some men can maintain, if they embrace it ... cragginess, weary masculinity. Women just get old and fat and wrinkly.
TRACY LETTS
August: Osage Country
There's a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it's really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not anymore. Now I'm startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Halloween mask made of sagging, pinkish- grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
The art of growing old is the art of being regarded by the oncoming generations as a support and not as a stumbling-block.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
Old men, what are they? Fast fading the leaf,
Three-footed they walk, yet frail as a child,
As a dream set afloat in the daylight.
AESCHYLUS
Agamemnon
Old age is perplexing to imagine in part because the definition of it is notoriously unstable. As people age, they tend to move the goalposts that mark out major life stages.
CERIDWEN DOVEY
"What Old Age Is Really Like", The New Yorker, October 1, 2015
Old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Coming of Age
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
No man loves life like him that's growing old.
SOPHOCLES
fragment, Acrisius
I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
T. S. ELIOT
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
I always liked people who are older. Of course, every year it gets harder to find them.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Paris Review, summer 1993
How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep ... that have taken hold.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Return of the King
Getting older was definitely preferable to an up close and personal meeting with the Grim Reaper.
JOANN ROSS
No Safe Place
Age is information failure. The body loses fluency.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past -- and when you're seventy, nearly all of you.
JEAN ANOUILH
Time Remembered
What Youth deemed crystal,
Age finds out was dew.
ROBERT BROWNING
"Jochanan Hakkadosh"
Old men's prayers for death are lying prayers, in which they abuse old age and long extent of life. But when death draws near, not one is willing to die, and age no longer is a burden to them.
EURIPIDES
Alcestis